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“You stand atop the spires / To see your vigil fires/Burn so far away / On a saffron mezzanine”

Skyscraper: …is it mainly a personal thing—for you to write songs as a personal experience?

Brian Girgus: Yeah, it’s weird, see sometimes I wonder if a lot of the things Imaad is singing about, he’ll say things in a song and I’m just like ‘’oh that’s weird, I know exactly what incident he is talking about right now”, and then other times he will just kind of paint these pictures of things that are potentials in his head or things that could happen or things that he had some dream about or something. What was the exact thing you asked me again?

The back half of Kill the Lights is one of the more visceral album sides in any genre. Admittedly, “visceral” is one of those adjectives that get brought out a little too often in attempts to describe passionate records. For clarity’s sake, let’s double check Merriam-Webster’s definition: “coming from strong emotions and not from logic or reason”. When people writing about music use the word “visceral”, they are, more often than not, probably thinking of the first half of its definition, and not intending to demean the artist by suggesting they were neglecting logic and/or reason.

by Jennifer Kelly

“I was really into [nu-metal/post-hardcore producer] Ross Robinson and how he would be recording and throw a chair at somebody to get a more aggressive performance,” says Jasamine White-Gluz when asked about her influences for the new No Joy album, More Faithful. At the Drive In, whom White-Gluz cites, is a surprising touchstone for a band most often compared to shoegazers like My Bloody Valentine and Slowdive and whose third-full length clears the fuzz for a strikingly pop oriented sound. Yet White-Gluz says it was all about moving outside her comfort zone.

No Joy finished its latest album in an isolated farmhouse in Costa Rica, stuck for days on end without wifi or television. The farmhouse belonged to producer Jorge Elbrecht’s family, and while Elbrecht was no chair thrower, he did push White-Gluz and her fellow band members into surprising places.

White-Gluz, who asked her producer to make her uncomfortable recalls, “I would have to sing my vocals with no reverb and do them over and over again and in front of people. On the last record, I was singing in a dark room and alone and you couldn’t really see me. It made me uncomfortable.” By the end, she says, “I kind of regretted wanting him to push me, but, I asked for this.”

“This song is about licking the blood of Christ’s cock while he’s up there dying!” Neil McAdams, bearded vocalist for Black Breath snarls, as the rest of the band launches into one of their many crusty, Entombed-derived “death ‘n’ roll” tunes. The small but exuberant crowd of people near the stage cheer in approval, heads banging, fists pumping, energy building, to the point where you know a pit will erupt sooner than later, which doesn’t always happen for an opening band.

Some bands are the sum of their parts and nothing more: the individual musicians need to feed off each other to achieve good music. They need that chemistry of the players. Other bands are the opposite, featuring great solo musicians that don’t play well with others. Those bands don’t usually last long, as the music doesn’t gel or interpersonal conflicts cause the band to splinter.

It’s a rare band that achieves both ends of this spectrum, and Fleetwood Mac is one group who has somehow found a way to thrive artistically as a band while also spawning a plethora of creative solo works. (Granted, of course, that many of those solo works came from artists who left the band due to conflict.)

Jacob Furr has been on our radar for a couple years, due to the surprisingly small world of Texas songwriters and Country Fried Rock alumni. Larry Hooper played Couch By Couch West and mentioned Furr, and then through our recent alumni, St. Paul and the Broken Bones, we were also connected via conversations about coffee. How does all of this relate to Furr’s new album, Trails & Traces? As Jacob profoundly says in our conversation, “We don’t live in a vacuum. None of us are doing this alone.”